


lives darkly

by nerddowell



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A lot - Freeform, I mean Bucky pines over Steve, Kid Fic, M/M, Pre-War, and it's implied that Steve does the same, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-04-11 01:38:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4416152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerddowell/pseuds/nerddowell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a Tumblr number drabbles prompt, "Stucky + 5 ("Wait a minute. Are you jealous?"); 5 + 1 (again, I know, I'm sorry) Stucky one-shot - 5 times Bucky was jealous of Steve, and once when the reverse was true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lives darkly

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed, all mistakes my own, yadda yadda.

_I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where._  
_I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;_  
_so I love you because I know no other way_  
-Pablo Neruda

 **1.** James Buchanan Barnes is not accustomed to the feeling of wanting something that somebody else has, so desperately. He admits that, at seven years of age and with reasonably well-off parents, he gets pretty much whatever he asks for at some point, be it right away (a snack, dinner) or later on (a toy for his birthday or Christmas). But today, looking at the small blond boy in the corner of the infant kids' playground, with his nose in a book and his thick glasses constantly sliding down his nose and being pushed back up with one spindly finger, James Buchanan Barnes is jealous.

He is jealous of the boy's absolute comfort in his solitude; of his confidence, the knowledge that he doesn't need to be surrounded by people giving him attention to be happy. Bucky is almost pathologically obsessed with being part of whatever is going on - as in, having people to create havoc with. He can't cope with being alone; his house is always full of people, Ma singing to the radio whilst she bakes, Dad humming to himself as he worked on the car in the garage, his sister screaming for her rusk or playing tea parties with her dolls: always noisy, always full of activity. He's never learned to be quiet and alone. This kid, to Bucky, is some kind of mirage. No child he knows of their age is ever so still, so silent and absorbed in entirely their own thing. He wants in.

 **2.** Bucky is now (having befriended Steve by offering him a scrunched-up dandelion hastily picked from a weed patch in the schoolyard with the words, "'s'somethin' pretty fer you t'draw") uncomfortably aware that Steve is always, always in trouble. Not with teachers; he's almost angelically good in the classroom, never flicking pieces of eraser or rolled-up wads of scrap paper off his ruler at other students the way Bucky's friends always do; he just sits, gets through his work - slowly, on account of his printing every letter to look absolutely perfect - and finishes all the assignments diligently. Bucky occasionally struggles, getting his letters and words mixed up or back to front, and his handwriting is atrocious, but he's getting distracted - about Steve being always in trouble. Right.

Steve has what can only be described as a hero complex. He sees a younger kid, or a girl, or even an older kid being picked on by the schoolyard bullies with their bulky frames and rough, crude voices - and he storms in, tiny fists swinging, stepping between them to end the fight his way. Of course, one flick of the wrist from the bullies and he's down - down, but never out. Because he climbs back up onto his feet, bruised a little maybe, or with scraped knees; he climbs back up onto his feet and he stands his tiny square of ground and he. _Doesn't. Give. In._

Ever.

It always comes down to Bucky to send the bullies howling for their Ma away from him, but he can't help feeling a tiny prickle of envy towards Steve. Bucky would rather run away from a fight that was getting nasty if it didn't involve him or someone he cared about, or else use his silver tongue (as his Ma called it; once, when he was little, he stuck it out to check whether it really was silver and was disappointed to find it pink and slightly pointy, like everyone else on the planet's) to get out of it. Steve didn't have that flight reflex; it was pure fight, fight, fight with him, steady as a rock, never allowing them to grind him down. For all Bucky's physical size and strength, he doesn't have a teaspoon of Steve's perseverance (sheer bull-headed stubbornness, he calls it) in him. He admires it in his friend, of course, but he can't help wishing to be more like Steve, all the same.

 **3.** Bucky can't help it. He sees Steve in that uniform - that star-spangled uniform with the striped belt and the tights and the itchy-looking felt cowl with the A and the wings - and he is horrendously, burningly jealous. And Captain America is definitely Steve - albeit a Steve who has grown almost a foot and bulked out to the size of two Buckys put together - but the only wars he's seen are the ones in movie studios, with sets made from foam and rubber, boulders you could pick up with two fingers and enemies that go down before you even make contact to clock them.

Bucky is trapped in the hellhole that is the European Theatre, screaming and earth-shattering crashes and bomb blasts ringing in his ears, stinking of sweat and blood and piss and Christ knows what else whilst he picks off one Nazi bastard after another and just sees two more pop up in his place, like his Ma's old wives' tale about grey hairs - Steve is strolling around America pretending to fight, and he's here doing the real thing and spending the whole time he's not trying to reload his rifle with fingers that won't stop fucking shaking, terrified that someone's going to load theirs faster and pick him off like flicking a beetle off their shoulder.

Steve isn't fighting. Steve isn't watching his friends, his comrades, dying around him in trenches and pits dug in the snow and iron-hard mud, isn't listening to the approach of German boots like Hemingway's bell tolling the death march, isn't hearing himself screaming his name as the 'scientists' - is that what they call fucking torturers in this shithole? - inject him with things that make his blood burn in his veins, make his head ache fit to burst like a watermelon, slice him open and flay him alive on the table -

He's a dead man breathing - they all are, in President Roosevelt's war - and there's nothing he can do about it but try and kill the Germans faster than they can kill him, and wait for death or home. Whichever is closest.

 **4.** Bucky is watching Steve insist that he leave, that he run out of that burning factory and join the rest of the 107th. He's watching him, seeing his mouth move, forming those words - "Go! Go, now!" but he's not hearing them. He refuses to. He doesn't understand how Steve can be so fucking stupid - how he can be so blind, so unbelievably dense as to think that Bucky would ever leave him there, would ever let him kill himself to give his friend chance to get out - even if he knows he would've done the exact same himself.

He can't stand how easily the selfless options seem to come to Steve - as though he would never even think about saving his own skin first. Saving himself, the symbol of American justice and freedom from oppression, the only person truly keeping American morale alive in this war - gone? Snuffed out, because the goddamn idiot was too fucking selfless to consider what Bucky would want (which, it goes without saying, was the wholly selfish option of having his best damn friend in the world walk out of that factory with him, charred and scarred with the heat and the explosions, but alive).

Steve's goddamn hero complex. Again. Looking at him across that gaping chasm of fire, Bucky is seeing the tiny, scrappy blond kid with the bruised face and the split lip, insisting he "had 'em on the ropes!" He's seeing the kid that would save the whole damn country before himself, who would leave Bucky without the balm for his painfully selfish desires - in the name of self-sacrifice. He was a fucking idiot, and Bucky hated - and, god help him, fucking loved - him for it. He's wishing that he could throw himself into the fire to get Steve out - douse the flames with his own blood, smother the embers with his flesh - but he can't. Steve's the one made for that kind of martyrdom, not him. But he wishes. Christ, does he wish. Maybe then he'd be worthy of Steve; maybe then, he'd be worthy of anyone other than someone as miserable, as bitter and fucked up and twisted as himself.

 **5.** Bucky watches Steve the entire time he's looking at her, and his heart twists in his chest. He looks at her, and feels a hatred so sharp, so intense, forcing its way through his ribcage that it feels like someone's taken a pick axe to his ribs and cracked them wide open. He hates her, pure and simple, for the way Steve looks at her. With his eyes soft, twinkling blue, and his lips turned up in that smile that was previously only for Bucky, and now is all for her.

But Steve, too - it's an awful thing to admit to, and it makes him feel like absolute shit, the worst, the fucking worst - he's jealous. Since when has he ever gone anywhere with Steve and played second fiddle when the dames came over? Since when has there ever been a girl who saw his charming smile and mischievous grey eyes, and then took a look at Steve and thought, _I'll take the blond_? Since when did that ever happen?

And now he's there in that bar, with Steve and Agent Carter, and she's making cow eyes at Steve and he's equally as fuckin' bad right back at her, and Bucky wants to stick two fingers down his throat and puke this vicious, poisonous feeling right up.

* * *

**+1**. Steve stares at Bucky across the gangway of the helicarrier, at the dead blue-grey eyes and the set mouth and the deadly still, poised body, ready to spring at any second, and thinks, _Why me. Why me, to face him right now - why me, to be here and look at that face_ (that _face, that **face** , Bucky, **Bucky**_ -) and have to stop him. Having to look straight at Bucky and think of hurting him, think of ways to incapacitate him and that bionic arm that was too strong, even for Steve - even for Bucky himself, it seemed, sometimes.

He envies Bucky the ease of it; he has his missions, his targets, and he's spared the guilt. He doesn't have to look in his victim's eyes and see the kid they were, bruised and battered and dragging his own skinny ass out of a back alley away from a fight. He doesn't have all of those memories of laughing and crying and hugging and even - deepest recesses, forbidden and denied - imagining, kisses and touches and the groan of his name, thick in Steve's throat, _Bucky, Bucky_ as he came, hot and wet spraying over his hand and up his wrist as his chest heaved and he fucked his fist through it, gasping - he doesn't see that. And he envies him.

But then, he's looking up at Bucky through swollen eyes, the metal fist raised behind his friend's head - and he sees it. The click of the cogs settling into place, the widening of his eyes and the horror flashing through his expression as it all plays, a fast-forward movie reel, everything they ever did and said and promised to each other, every touch, every smile - every proof that Steve was right, that Bucky was his friend, not the machine trying to bludgeon him to death with a metal fist - and the tears are hot and prickling in his eyes, and the helicarrier floor gives way, Steve thinks, just as the first tear dangles dangerously on the tip of an eyelash, threatening to fall.

Steve falls instead.

He falls, he sinks, and he says goodbye in his mind - to the friend he saw in those final moments, the little boy with the crushed flower and the cocky smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Psst, my Tumblr is [here](http://youaremvmission.tumblr.com) if you want to leave me a prompt!


End file.
